Islam v Christianity: the matchup (link).
(0)Monthly Archive for September, 2006
This week’s WTF goes to a year old report from the Harvard Business School (link) that hashes out the Microsoft vs. Linux/Open Source debate, but from a business/economic factor. It doesn’t say anything novel, but it gets the WTF award for apparently misunderstanding the nature of OSS. It’s really quite simple: OSS stands for community involvement, not market shares. Of course Microsoft will be top dog in market shares because OSS is not about the market. The people who develop Open Source software (especially the GNU folks) don’t use their market shares as the bottom line because for them, it’s about making a piece of software that works and sharing it with the rest of the world. Drop a line at the folks at Debian and ask them if they’re concerned about Microsoft having more of the market share than Linux: they won’t really care. Sure, they’ll say that it’d be nice of more people used Linux, but their argument will be one from a coder’s perspective, not a CEO’s.
Yesterday marked the first day of class for this term. In my class last night, we began with discussing “what is religion” (which is a good topic). One of the things we decided on was threefold (and in my terms):
- To locate some kind of absolute, be it God, some Ultimate Reality, etc.
- To draw humans closer to that.
- To answer the “big questions”
Here’s the diatribe: Christendom, in its current state, has completely failed at #2. Most religious practices in Christendom fail to do this consistently because it is more about the actual practice and not the internal state that is supposed to arise because of the practice. In other words, Christendom is more interested in worship (i.e. “going through the motions”) than it is about worship (i.e. a change in self with regards to God).
In another vein, the word “sacred” originally meant “set apart.” But it’s not the kind of “set apart” that seclusion brings. It’s the kind of “set apart” that is temporary. In other words, it is marginality. True religious experiences occur in the margins of “normal society” and that is where the religious community finds its identity. But, this identity does not require the continued marginality, in fact, it excludes it. Take, for instance, Buddhist monks and nuns. These people serve a set, temporary time in a monastary (i.e. marginal community) and then return to “normal society” and their regular activity. Christendom fails at drawing people closer to God because its religious activity is not marginal. It is an expected social event every Sunday (or Saturday for the 7th Day Adventists), not a marginal experience. Now, i am not saying that churches should rid their buildings of “normal” things (such as the video and audio equipment, etc). What i am saying is that there must be some kind of intentionality–”mindfulness” (if you will allow the current Buddhist concept). Without this, Christendom is not a religion, but a cultural phenomena no different than an NFL game.
i got a new jump drive on Saturday, a Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 — 256Mb. It claimed to be “Linux compatible.” Well, it had a screwed up partition table that made it unreadable in Debian systems. Well, after playing around with QtParted, fdisk, cfdisk, parted, and sfdisk, it now works correctly as a “Linux compatible” drive while still being readable in Windows. Then, because KDE has been giving me problems with mounting the usb drives, i finally edited /etc/fstab for the jump drives.
Also, i am resurrecting a Pentium 150MHz laptop for a friend and have found that Ubuntu Lite has been the best solution. With only 80Mb of RAM and 4.8Gb of hard drive, UL, with iceWM, has been the fatest GUI for the 800×600x8bit display. i am still working on playing with Xorg to display in 16-bit color (and hopefully even 24-bit), but that hasn’t been resolved yet. i put into the PCMCIA socket a USB reader (so that it can use a USB mouse and jump-drive) and a wi-fi card. Ubuntu came with the necessary module (airo) preloaded, so it worked right out of the box, but i’m having problems with the USB card. dmesg and cardctl report that the card isn’t powered on, so i’m hunting down a solution for that one. Also, i haven’t been able to get ALSA working (apparently, Ubuntu lacks alsaconf and module-assistant), so it is currently without sound. Once those problems are resolved, it will be a decent computer, resurrected from the grave, and able to be a stable terminal.
